Art: The $60,000 Dig

The history of art has always been speckled with digs and jabs by
artists at real or imagined foes. But none of the victimsnot even
Picasso's distorted womenactually took their outrage or wounded
vanity to court until 1975, in New York City, when two artists, Jacob
Silberman and Anthony Siani, sued a colleague, Paul Georges, for libel.
The reason: Georges' painting The Mugging of the Muse (right), which
includes two sinister figures wearing masks that, the plaintiffs
claimed, were their own faces. Complained Siani: "It lessens me in
front of my peers because if an artist attacks the muse, he's...